Stingers

On one of those indecisive early winter afternoons—warm in the sun, nippy out of it—Chucker Branch and Christine Lehner, his partner, were on the roof of the Whitney Museum, winterizing their bees. Lehner had on a white canvas bee jacket with attached hat and veil, but Branch, who is six feet seven inches tall and has a shock of white hair, doesn’t go in for protective gear. He stripped off his sweatshirt, because “bees don’t like fleece, for some reason,” and began pumping smoke from a handheld smoker down into one of the two wooden box hives that he had installed there. “It tells the bees that there’s a forest fire and they need to load up on honey and not worry about—well, us,” Lehner, who is about five-five and brimming with bee information, said. “That’s the theory, anyway.”

Branch and Lehner have nine hives in Hastings-on-Hudson, where they live, and the idea of putting hives on city rooftops occurred to them about five years ago, when a friend gave Lehner a jar of honey from bees that lived, boulevardier style, on top of the Paris Opéra. They also learned that the Tate galleries, in London, have bees, whose honey is sold in the gift shop; that Fortnum & Mason sells honey from hives on its roof; and that the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, and the Winterthur Museum, in Delaware, market their own honey. “Roofs,” Lehner said, “are the great underutilized resource in New York City.”

So far, Branch-installed bees are producing honey on top of the Natural Resources Defense Council, on West Twentieth Street, and on the roofs of two private houses on the Upper East Side, one of which belongs to the Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg. Weinberg and his wife, Lorraine Ferguson, had heard about Branch, and they thought that beekeeping might appeal to their ten-year-old daughter, Kira, which it did. Introducing bees at the Whitney was the obvious next step. Sixteen months earlier, it would have been illegal. A law against keeping wild animals in city apartments was passed during the Giuliani administration, and the prohibited species included bees. In 2010, the city’s Board of Health passed a bill, introduced by the Brooklyn councilman David Yassky, that exempted bees, and beekeepers in the five boroughs rejoiced.

Initially, the plan was to sell the honey through Untitled, the Whitney’s restaurant, but the hives weren’t installed until last July, too late for the first harvest, and the fifty pounds they produced last year wasn’t enough to market. Weinberg decided to give it to friends of the museum instead. He commissioned the artist Kiki Smith to design a label, which reads “Flora Honey,” in honor of Flora Miller Biddle, the museum’s former president and the granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, its founder. Branch extracts the honey, processes it, and plans to sell it to the museum at a discount. Small-scale beekeepers are lucky if they break even, and both Branch and Lehner have other occupations: Branch restores old houses; Lehner writes fiction.

Up on the roof, Branch pulled a frame from one of the hives. Bees were thick on every inch of it, crawling over one another. “You see the queen here?” he said. “The one that’s elongated?” He pointed her out with a bare forefinger, to which several bees promptly attached themselves. Dozens were flying around his head. “I have to get her back to the hive,” Branch said.

“Once she takes her nuptial flight, the queen never leaves the hive unless the bees swarm,” Lehner explained. “All she does is lay eggs. During the season”—which starts this month and lasts through September—“she lays maybe fifteen hundred eggs a day.” What do city bees feed on? “There are plenty of flowering trees nearby—honey locusts and Callery pears,” Lehner said. “City bees tend to do better than bees in heavily agricultural areas, because there aren’t so many pesticides here.” A few years back, when bees started dying off from the mystifying colony-collapse disorder, a lot of small beekeepers were thrown out of business, but now many more are starting up. “Colony-collapse disorder really made headlines, and people got interested in bees as a result,” Lehner said.

“Now they’re starting to breed better queens,” Branch said. “I don’t treat any of my bees. I don’t want to put chemicals in the hive. If they survive, fine, and if they don’t the ones that do survive are a better breed.” Branch paused to let Lehner remove a stinger from just under his right eye. “I take a few stings here and there,” he said. “Some people get stung regularly, on purpose, because a bee sting is pretty good for arthritis.” ♦